Terms of Endearment: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1980s and 1990s 9780585070186

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TERMS OF ENDEAR MENT

TERMS OF ENDEARMENT Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1980s and 1990s

Edited by Peter William Evans and Celestino Deleyto

Edinburgh University Press

©The contributors, 1998 Transferred to Print on Demand 2010 Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Palatino Light by Pioneer Associates, Perthshire, and Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 0885 0 The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

vii

List of Contributors

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

1 Introduction: Surviving Love Peter William Evans and Celestino Deleyto 2 Love Lies: Romantic Fabrication in Contemporary Romantic Comedy

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15

Frank Krutnik

3 'I Think I Could Fall in Love with Him': Victor/Victoria and the 'Drag' of Romantic Comedy Steven Cohan 4 Murphy's Romance: Romantic Love and the Everyday

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Deborah Thomas

5 Something Wild: Take a Walk on the Wild Side (But Be Home before Midnight)

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Constanza del Rfo 6 Time Trips and Other Tropes: Peggy Sue Got Married and the Metaphysics of Romantic Comedy

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Bruce Babington

7 Working Girl: A Case Study of Achievement by Women? New Opportunities, Old Realities

Chantal Comut-Gentille v

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CONTENTS

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8 Love and Other Triangles: Alice and the Conventions of Romantic Comedy Celestino Deleyto

9 The Fever and the Itch: Matching Plots in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever Isabel C. Santaolalla

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148

10 Allison Anders's Gas Food Lodging: Independent Cinema and the New Romance Kathleen Rowe Karlyn

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11 Meg Ryan, Megastar Peter William Evans

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Select Bibliography

209

Index

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ----==---

2.1 Annie Hall The split screen anticipates the fragmentation of the couple as Allen grants more (neurotic) space to himself as Alvy than to Annie (Diane Keaton) 2.2

When Harry Met Sally Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) begin their quest for a trouble-free paradise

3 Victor/Victoria Deconstructing the gender system: Victor (Julie Andrews) impersonates the impersonator 4

Murphy's Romance Role reversals in the context of modern romance

5 Something Wild Trapped between two sources of anxiety, Charlie (Jeff Daniels) momentarily settles for the male bond, while Lulu (Melanie Griffith) looks on powerless 6 Peggy Sue Got Married Peggy Sue's (Kathleen Turner) wistful recollections of the past's bygone certainties 7 Working Girl Looking the part: in her quest for the New Jerusalem, Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) disowns the past in her fabrication of a new identity 8 Alice

Affluence as hysteria: Alice (Mia Farrow) longs for change on vii

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

her way out of a Fifth Avenue boutique 9.1 Jungle Fever The interracial romance between Flipper (Wesley Snipes) and Angie (Annabella Sciarra) 9.2 Jungle Fever The African-American family under threat

10 Gas Food Lodging In the modern romance, love is rarely here to stay 11 MegRyan The reaffirmation of romance

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Bruce Babington, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Co-author of Blue Skies and Silver Linings: Aspects of the Hollywood Musical (1985), Affairs to Remember: the Hollywood Comedy of the Sexes (1989) and Biblical Epics: Sacred Narrative in the Hollywood Cinema (1993). Steven Cohan, Syracuse University. Co-author of Telling Stories (1987) and The Road Movie Book (1997); co-editor of Screening the Male (1993); and author of Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (1997). Chantal Comut-Gentille, University of Zaragoza, has published widely on British and American literature, culture and film, including 'The Hidden Gender of Money in Breakfast at Tiffany's and Pretty Woman' (1995) and 'Gender Implications and Political Undertones in Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover' (1996). Constanza del Rio, University of Zaragoza, has published several articles on film and literature, including' High Sierra: Going Back Home' (1992). Celestino Deleyto, University of Zaragoza. Editor of Flashbacks: Rereading the Classical Hollywood Cinema (1992), has published in Cinema Journal, Film Criticism, Forum for Modem Language Studies and other British and Spanish journals. Peter William Evans, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. Author of The Films of Luis Bufiuel: Subjectivity and Desire (1995) and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1996); co-author ix

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

of Blue Skies and Silver Linings: Aspects of the Hollywood Musical (1985), Affairs to Remember: The Hollywood Comedy of the Sexes (1989) and Biblical Epics: Sacred Narrative in the Hollywood Cinema (1993).

Frank Krutnik, University of Aberdeen. Author of In a Lonely Street: Film Nair, Genre, Masculinity (1991) and co-author of Popular Film and Television Comedy (1990). Author of several articles on Hollywood comedy, and currently writing a book on Jerry Lewis. Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, University of Oregon. Author of The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (1995) and 'Comedy, Melodrama and Gender: Theorizing the Genres of Laughter' (1995). Isabel Santaolalla, University of Zaragoza, has published on postcolonial literatures and on ethnic and gender issues in British and American film and literature, including 'This Island's also Mine: New cinematic Expressions of a New Britishness' (1995) and 'East Is East and West Is West? Otherness in Capra's Bitter Tea of General Yen' (forthcoming). Deborah Thomas, University of Sunderland, has written several articles on Hollywood cinema, including 'Psychoanalysis and Film Nair' (1992), 'How Hollywood Deals with the Deviant Male' (1992), on John Wayne and on the films of Max Ophuls.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We gratefully acknowledge assistance, support and encouragement from the following: The Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia for a grant given to Peter William Evans to stay at the University of Zaragoza for a semester in 1995-6 when the idea for this book was conceived; the BPI stills library; the University of Zaragoza and the Research Committee of the School of Modern Languages, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London for funding towards stills; colleagues in the Departamento de Pilologfa Inglesa y Alemana, Universidad de Zaragoza (especially Susana Onega and Chantal Cornut-Gentille), and the Department of Hispanic Studies and Italian, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London; students on the Curso de doctorado at Zaragoza and on the European MA at QMW for lively discussions on Hollywood Romantic Comedy; Anita, for her much more than romantic love, and Elena and Esther, for putting up with daddy's work; and Isabel. The still from Annie Hall is courtesy of Warner Bros; still from When Harry Met Sally, courtesy of Polygram; still from Victor/Victoria, courtesy of MGM; stills from Murphy's Romance and Peggy Sue Got Married, courtesy of Columbia Pictures; stills from Alice and Something Wild, courtesy of Carlton; stills from Jungle Fever, courtesy of Universal; still from Working Girl, courtesy of Orion; still from Gas Food Lodging, courtesy of Main Line; and Meg Ryan still, courtesy of the BPI Stills Department.

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Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: SURVIVING LOVE Peter William Evans and Celestino Deleyto

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It seems that when the new self pulls itself together, it is away

from the ground of full sexual dialectic. To argue this is to argue the death of romantic comedy. (Brian Henderson 1978: 19)

What are you going to do now that you know how the other half lives ... The other half of you? (Lulu/Audrey to Charlie in Something Wild, 1986)

The very conventionality of its message suggests that it [romantic comedy] endures in part because it speaks to powerful needs to believe in the utopian possibilities condensed on the image of the couple - the wish for friendship between women and men, for moments of joy in relationships constrained by unequal social power. (Kathleen Rowe 1995: 212)

It has become almost a commonplace of recent criticism of contempo-

rary romantic comedy to start, or at least, at some point, to engage with Henderson's too hasty prediction of the death of the genre. Various writers such as Babington and Evans (1989), Frank Krutnik (1990), Andrew Horton (1991), Steve Neale (1992) or Kathleen Rowe (1995) have remarked on the popularity of the genre in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and they all share the belief that romantic comedy can and will survive by adapting to changing historical circumstances. The genre tends to privilege the eternal, unchanging nature of romantic 1

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love and to gloss over those aspects from the surrounding culture which threaten it, or, as Neale and Krutnik have argued, to hold cultural transformations in place (1990: 171). Yet, in spite of the resilience of the genre's basic structure, changes have taken place which have prompted Krutnik to identify and theorise the cycle of the 'nervous romances', a group of films starting with Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979) and Starting Over (1979), which 'betrays an intense longing for the restitution of faith in the stability of the heterosexual couple as some kind of bulwark against the modern world' (1990: 63). A few years later, Neale distinguished between the 'nervous romances' and the popular romantic comedies of the late 1980s, which he labelled 'new romances'- films such as Splash! (1984), Romancing the Stone (1984), Murphy's Romance (19857) or Something Wild (1986), which represent a frank return to the old-fashioned values of traditional heterosexual romance (1992: 287). As can be seen, both Krutnik and Neale characterise the new romantic comedies as self-consciously establishing a link with their own tradition, insisting on the validity of its conventions and suggesting an unbroken line of continuity with the filmic and literary history of the genre. The popular success of Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado about Nothing (1993), neither strictly a nervous nor a new romance, although sharing traits of both, attests to the apparent irrelevance of those cultural and historical changes that have affected the genre since its Renaissance beginnings. Both a faithful adaptation of Shakespeare's play and a very contemporary romantic comedy, Much Ado, in spite of its double British origins (a British film adapting a British play), can be taken as representative of the Hollywood genre that the different chapters of this book will deal with. This is not to argue for the universality and ahistoricity of romantic comedy but, in fact, quite the opposite. The success of Branagh's film lies, to a great extent, in choosing the right text to be reintroduced in the culture of the 1990s and producing the right emphasis on or reinterpretation of those aspects of the original that most obviously tap into contemporary men and women's sensibilities. Whereas recent critical studies of different periods of Hollywood comedy stress the specificity of the historical factors that made the genre culturally viable and appealing to audiences (see most of the essays in Karnick and Jenkins, 1995), the lesson that Much Ado teaches us is that, important though the historical emphasis may be,

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divorce and remarriage, screwball and sex comedies, nervous and new romances all belong to an artistic tradition which embodies a very specific and relatively unchanged view of love, sexuality and marriage, a view which was already being put into circulation four hundred years ago. Love, argues C. S. Lewis, is a special state of affairs, which had a beginning in eleventh-century Provence and will have an end one day (1936: 3). Likewise romantic comedy. In the last two decades the genre is characterised by a self-conscious acknowledgement of that tradition, an acknowledgement which is also a defence against social convulsions in those very institutions of love, sexuality and marriage on which the genre is based. At the same time, however, cultural variations have been incorporated into the genre in several areas that attest not only to the genre's resilience but also to its flexibility to adapt to historical change. The various ways in which these changes are addressed and negotiated in the films will constitute the object of study of this book and will be returned to in this introduction, but discussion of changes becomes impossible without an initial awareness of their cultural origins and a critical receptivity towards what has not changed or what the texts themselves wish back into existence. The concept of love itself, the ultimate raison d'etre of the genre, has, as will be seen below, undergone important changes in our culture, but, in a certain sense, all those changes were already part of the contradictory structure of Shakespearean comedy. In the passage reproduced above, Henderson rightly links the fate of cultural representations of romantic love with a project of the self. This has been so since the beginnings of romantic comedy in the European Renaissance. Salingar has characterised Shakespearean comedy precisely as a process of discovery of a new identity through the vicissitudes of erotic attraction and courtship between lovers (1974). The modern perception of romantic love as the place in which identity is constructed or reconstructed relates it to Michel Foucault's views of sexuality. According to Foucault, we understand sex as the space in which we expect to find out the ultimate truth about ourselves, and we demand that it tell us our truth, what has been hidden or reshaped by a repressive society and its attendant ideology (1981: 69-70). Romantic comedy, therefore, inscribes itself within these historical discourses concerning love and sex. Henderson perceives a dissociation between contemporary examples of the genre, such as the film he singles out

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for analysis, Semi-Tough (1972), and what he calls the new self and, consequently, draws the conclusion that, without this foundational connection, romantic comedy cannot survive. The film is characteristic of what has been defined as the 'me decade' (Lasch 1991: 237). At the same time, however, a group of films was beginning to appear, particularly those directed by Woody Allen, in which an obsessive, narcissistic search for self-identity was being repositioned at the centre of the love entanglements. Some years later, Something Wild, a typically postmodern generic hybrid which also includes elements of nair and even horror films, illustrates how the link between love and self in romantic comedy is back in place and in good health. At the end of the rocky process of his romantic involvement with Lulu/ Audrey (Melanie Griffith) and his rather more sombre acquaintance with her husband Ray (Ray Liotta), Charlie (Jeff Daniels), the film's male protagonist, has discovered a new world totally unknown to the new yuppy class that he represents, but, above all, he has learned about the other in himself. Lulu/ Audrey herself has also found a new, rather unexpected, identity. The project of a life together for the two characters with which the film predictably finishes is based on the mutual awareness of each other's 'new' selves. If there had ever been a dissociation, romantic love and self-identity are back in their traditional partnership. Whereas an emotion more or less identifiable with love is, according to sociologists, a universal phenomenon (Giddens 1992: 37-8), romantic love is culturally specific, a type of relationship which appears in the European Renaissance, according to some, and no earlier than the end of the eighteenth century, according to others. C. S. Lewis, as is well known, has argued for a continuity between the medieval tradition of courtly love and literary representations of love in our time. What we understand by love was created by a group of poets in southern France in the eleventh century. Yet Lewis himself admits that even Andreas Capellanus, the most prestigious medieval theorist of love, ends up advising his fictional character, Walter, that 'no man through any good deeds can please God so long as he serves in the service of Love' (Lewis 1936: 41). In other words, even in Andreas, love is still the unruly passion that is most similar to a form of madness and brings about evil consequences for those who indulge in it. Traces of this form of madness can be found everywhere in Shakespeare, as can be seen in Theseus' famous comparison of lovers and lunatics in A Midsummer

Introduction: Surviving Love

5

Night's Dream or in Olivia's experience of falling in love when she first sees Cesario: 'Even so quickly may one catch the plague' (I.v.299). However, a shift can be found taking place in this period: love is increasingly differentiated from lust as having its origin in the mind. Desire begins to be legitimated in this ideal union of minds, and it is in this period that, for the first time, love and marriage are united, and love becomes a moral and spiritual experience, the basis of a lifetime of happiness. The arbitrariness and unreliability of the passion gradually give way to a civilised, domestic feeling which is constituted as the centre of a social structure based on marriage and the family. It is in this context that romantic comedy, a literary form that celebrates love and marriage, is born (see Belsey 1985: 138-48 and Rose 1988: 12-42). But love is not now the kind of madness that it was in classical literature, the devouring passion of the Middle Ages or the frivolous game of late medieval romances. It begins to be represented as a complex spiritual and emotional force which guarantees the stability of the social structure into which it has been incorporated. According to Giddens, romantic love only starts making its presence fully felt towards the end of the eighteenth century and, unlike the intense, unruly passion which it culturally replaced (which he, following Stendhal, calls amour passion), it introduces the idea of a personal narrative in people's lives. While the phrase 'love at first sight' is often associated with romantic love, this'first glance' is a gesture which implies the discovery of potentialities in the other for a life together, and not (or not just) the compulsive erotic desire which it seems to indicate (1992: 39-40). Yet passionate love is, as Giddens affirms, a universal feeling that was not erased from our culture by the increasing prestige of romantic love, to the extent that, in theoretical and critical analyses of the phenomenon, the two have often been mixed together. It is as if romantic love has, in the course of the past four centuries, gradually absorbed into its own experience all other known love experiences. Virginia Wright Wexman, for example, in her brilliant study of love and marriage in Hollywood cinema, argues, via Niklas Luhman, that there is a basic contradiction between 'the concept of romantic love as an intense, all-consuming passion that is by its nature short-lived and its status in the modem world as the cornerstone of lifelong monogamous marriage' (1993: 8). She goes on to say that Hollywood films erase this contradiction by making the happy ending coincide with marriage as

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the culmination of romantic passion and freezing this passion in an eternal moment of unproblematic happiness. What happens after marriage is never known. Yet, if we look at classical Hollywood romantic comedy, from the 1930s to the 1960s, there is usually little place for Wexman's all-consuming passion, and erotic intensity is most often replaced by a sexual drive that is also a socialising force and the foundation of a project for the future. Whereas romantic melodramas often feature a form of amour passion which, by its very nature, dies at the moment of maximum intensity and is never fulfilled, and, therefore, not part of a joint narrative of the two lovers, 1 the idea of love put forward by' screwball' comedies and other classical genres is closer to Giddens's description of romantic love. Love and marriage have, therefore, been indissolubly linked in romantic comedy. It has been argued that the periods of greatest success of the genre, such as the early divorce comedies and the 'screwball' cycle, coincide with historical crises of the institution of marriage (see Charles Musser 1995 and Tina Olsin Lent 1995), and can be seen as rearguard attempts on the part of the dominant ideology to ward off the fragmenting threats of modem societies. Similarly, it has been said that the cycle of 'sex comedies' of the 1950s and early 1960s appears at a time of unprecedented open discussions of sexual matters in the USA and one in which marriage is increasingly perceived as a repressive institution (see Krutnik 1990: 58-62), but the comedies themselves, for all the tensions and aggressiveness (usually directed at 'independent' women of the Doris Day type), stick firmly to the traditional happy ending in which marriage is still perceived as the best solution. It could, then, just as easily be affirmed that the new romantic comedies of the 1980s and 1990s appear as a conservative response to one more period of profound crisis in marriage in Western societies, and their success is due, as Neale and others have argued, to a deeply felt nostalgia for a paradise of innocence, evoked by classical examples of the genre (see Neale 1992: 287, 294-9). Yet, as such paradigmatic films as Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Broadcast News (1987), Big (1988), Green Card (1990) or, more recently, My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) among many others show, marriage or the prospect of a wedding seem to have become less central elements of the genre and, certainly, less centrally associated with the happy ending. In other no less successful cases, such as

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Something Wild, Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Pretty Woman (1989) or Housesitter (1992), the more unambiguous project of a lasting monogamous heterosexual relationship is put in inverted commas, openly parodied, as if the films were afraid to feature a wedding between their protagonists as the culmination of their love. Even though it may be argued that the nominal absence of wedlock, or the films' nervous self-consciousness about it, are just poses to adapt superficially to the Zeitgeist, and, deep inside, the institution itself is not only not threatened but intensely supported, some things seem to have changed. It is not that love features less centrally (it is still hard to imagine a romantic comedy without love), but perhaps what the films pit against the everpresent dangers of fragmentation and dissolution threatening its central tenet is not any more, or not so clearly, the concept of romantic love, either in Wexman's or in Giddens's sense, but something slightly but significantly different. Steve Seidman has argued that important changes in US American intimate conventions have taken place in the course of the twentieth century. The dominant spiritual ideal of love of the Victorian period was replaced, in the first decades of this century, by a concept of true love that combined sexual fulfilment and idealised solidarity. This sexualisation of love obviously affected discourses of romantic love even in cases such as screwball comedy, in which the sexual drive was not represented in direct fashion but in more metaphoric or displaced ways. More recently, however, sex has become more and more separated from the sphere of love and romance and acquired a certain prestige as a medium of pleasure and self-expression, even though, to a very large extent, it still remains entangled with the emotional and moral resonances of love (1991: 4-5 and passim). These often conflictive meanings of sex as part of the ethos of romantic love and sex as a medium of pleasure in itself and as carrier of individual identity, and, further, the relation of both meanings to an institution such as marriage that has been in crisis since the beginning of the twentieth century, have gradually found their way, in more or less direct or displaced manners, into the structure of contemporary romantic comedies. As Neale has argued referring to the cycle of nervous romances at the end of the 1970s, these comedies reflect 'the dislocation of fucking from "commitment" and the (ideological) dislocation of both these things from marriage' (1992: 286).

PETER WILLIAM EVANS AND CELESTINO DELEYTO

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), although, like Much Ado about Nothing, a British film, likewise caught the imagination of both US and European audiences and became one of the most successful romantic comedies of the early 1990s. In the film's final scene, after Charles (Hugh Grant) decides not to marry his fiancee in the last minute, because he is in love with Carrie (Andie MacDowell), he makes the following proposition to Carrie: 'Do you think, after we've dried off, after we've spent lots more time together, you might agree not to marry me? And do you think not being married to me might maybe be something you'd consider doing for the rest of your life?' To which Carrie, in a repetition of the traditional formula at weddings, replies,'! do'. The mechanisms of representation conjured up by the film for this happy ending are no different from those used in the past; the feeling of exhilaration experienced by audiences resembles that described by Kathleen Rowe in one of the opening quotations of this introduction; and the conceit used by Charles practically amounts to a fully-fledged proposition of marriage. But, as the comedy explicitly asserts, this is a proposition that excludes marriage and one, which, in its absurd use of the negative, undercuts the long-term engagement which it apparently enunciates. Giddens suggests that romantic love does not, in our end-of-the-twentieth-century society, represent the highest aspiration of men and women any longer and it has been replaced by what he calls 'confluent love'. Confluent love is active, contingent love that excludes the 'forever' and the 'one-and-only' qualities of romantic love. In this type of love, it is 'the special relationship' and not'the special person' that counts. It presumes equality in emotional give and take and, unlike romantic love, it is not necessarily monogamous in the sense of sexual exclusiveness. What holds the relationship together is the acceptance that each partner gains sufficient benefit from the relation to make it worth their while. The sustained increase in divorce and separation rates is not so much the cause as the consequence of this new type of love (Giddens 1992: 61-3). Clearly, Four Weddings and a Funeral, like other recent comedies, still abides by some of the 'precepts' of romantic love- the specialness of the chosen partner, among them - but, in its interrogation of the sodal convention of the wedding and its intennittent but firm endotsement of the contingency of contemporary relationships, it becomes one of many ideological instruments in the problematic but relentless evolution of

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the concept of love in Western societies and their attendant artistic institutions such as Hollywood cinema. Like Four Weddings, My Best Friend's Wedding revolves around the idea of marriage as the culmination of love and the start of a narrative of the couple. Yet, in an apparently unexpected turn for a mainstream romantic comedy, the protagonist, Julianne (Julia Roberts), ends up losing the man she is in love with to her rival and has to make do with her relationship with her gay friend George (Rupert Everett), a relationship which, as he says to her, will involve no marriage, certainly no sex, but a great deal of dancing. The film ends with the two dancing together at the other couple's wedding. Like Four Weddings, this film uses all the conventions but with a twist that questions their validity, introducing the concept of friendship as a rival for romantic love in the genre. It is not only that, as Krutnik concludes, the happy ending, although remaining a structural necessity, is 'for as long as possible, delayed, problematized, and cast in doubt' (1990: 70), but the convention itself is being rethought from text to text in order to incorporate social attitudes to love that will continue to make sense in our culture. It is not a question either of the contemporary romantic comedies being consistently transgressive of dominant views of gender relationships. Rather, the narrative and generic norms are, given their resistance to disappear in this genre, gradually changing their meanings. Romantic love is not what it used to be and contemporary romantic comedy teaches us, as will be seen in this book, that the texts themselves are being transformed by the experience, even though the genre itself remains alive and well. Our choice of films has sought to balance coverage of some of the most interesting examples of the genre in recent years with concentration on their mediation of key issues in contemporary American society. In keeping with our aim to theorise the development of modern romantic comedy against the background of the genre's history and the shifting social and material realities which have helped mould its newest forms, Frank Krutnik (Chapter 2) opens with a discussion of two major films, one a 'nervous romance', Annie Hall, and another, a 'new romance', When Harry Met Sally (1989). Noting the way that Annie Hall both disturbs the conventional order of romantic comedy and undermines the primacy of the heterosexual couple, he goes on to consider how When Harry Met Sally strives to recuperate the structures

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of heterosexual romance. Popular music and allusions to familiar romantic narratives reinforce this pattern in the later film, which in a sense rewrites the earlier one, reconstituting traditional values and reaffirming the place of the heterosexual couple even though, in what is a highly postmodern text, the idealisation of the couple is clearly figured as something rooted in fantasy and deception. In films like When Harry Met Sally the audience is taught not only to recognise but also to love the lie of modern romance. In Chapter 3 Steven Cohan considers, through his discussion of Victor/Victoria (1982) the way in which the climate of post-Gay Liberation politics in America opened up a space in mainstream Hollywood cinema for queer romantic comedy. While reaffirming the normality of heterosexual romance, both the subsidiary gay romances in the narrative and the key relationship between Victor/Victoria (Julie Andrews) and King Marchand (James Garner) draw attention to the performativity of gender, questioning, through the complex desires aroused by the lovers and by those who surround them, fixed categories, while simultaneously stressing the provisionality of all relationships. Challenges to inflexible categories of genre and gender are further explored (in Chapter 4) by Deborah Thomas in Murphy's Romance, also starring James Garner, in a role that here problematises his more patriarchal meanings in films like Victor/Victoria. In line with changing social attitudes, the Garner character, not Sally Field's, is willingly 'settled', the Field character, not Garner's, arrives from nowhere out of the dusty horizon. These reversals clearly invert patterns in which the male's identification with outside spaces and the female's with domesticity are the axiomatic principles of countless Hollywood films. Subversion of convention and of generic expectation are also much in evidence in Peggy Sue Got Married (Chapter 6), a more self-consciously 'postmodern' film which, as Bruce Babington argues, nevertheless equally sustains the 'reparative comedy's' optimistic embrace of generic traditions. Traced over with elements of melodrama, the film inevitably moves towards an ambiguous closure, its explorations of pleasure-principle affirmations of romantic love wittily filtered through the reality-principle suffused aesthetics of a destabilising nostalgia of 'time-trip' intertextual rhetoric. In this chapter, too, an opportunity is taken to consider representations of male and female subjectivity through analysis of their

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projection by two of Hollywood's most charismatic stars of the last decade or so, Kathleen Turner and Nicolas Cage. Like Peggy Sue Got Married, Something Wild is a hybrid film, here traced over with thriller as well as melodramatic elements and one which, as Constanza del Rio argues (Chapter 5), is characterised by tensions between the ingrained conservatism of traditional romantic comedy and a progressive agenda concerning subjectivity, the relations between the sexes, cultural, ethnic and social politics. Relying on Deleuze's theories of masochistic aesthetics, she explores the film's problematisation of masculinity- to the point where the male is forced to confront his own fears of homosexuality - but notes the extent to which its flirtation with radical gender politics, especially in its treatment of femininity, is finally subverted by ultimate obedience to the genre's classical conventions. Working Girl (1988) is another film made in the aftermath of the liberation ideologies of the 1960s. Here, as Chantal Cornut-Gentille notes (Chapter 7), the focus is on strategies for countering the stereotyping of women in popular art. While acknowledging the genre's traditional prioritisation of women, she stresses the originality of Working Girl's concentration on women's spaces and issues, decoupling the couple for long periods in the narrative, outlining the working life of a single woman. Even though it remains compromised by dominant assumptions woven into the fabric of its generic conventions and allusions, the film is inevitably marked by shifting attitudes towards gender, subjectivity and the place of women beyond the domain of domesticity. These are issues identified perhaps above all with the figure responsible for arguably the wittiest and liveliest romantic comedies of recent years, Woody Allen, and no book on the genre would be complete without reference to his work. While Allen has often been characterised as a filmmaker largely preoccupied with the burdens of modern masculinity, Celestino Deleyto (Chapter 8) reflects on his undoubted interest in female subjectivity. On this reading women are more than just the projection of a nervous masculinity. This chapter also offers scope through concentration on Alice (1991) for exploration in greater detail of the sophisticated aesthetics and social realism of someone whose verbal comedy has often deflected attention away from these other crucial areas, especially in so far as they contribute towards the

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subversion of the genre's utopian tendencies. Like Alice, Gas Food Lodging (1992) (Chapter 10) is another film that prioritises femalerelated questions, here given a feminist perspective by its director, Allison Anders. In this chapter Kathleen Rowe Karlyn also studies the extent to which independent films draw on and self-consciously raid the conventions of traditional Hollywood genres. Gas Food Lodging reformulates classic Hollywood romantic comedy, pursuing much more freely, in addition to specifically women-related questions, issues concerning class and race. Race is a primary component of Jungle Fever (1991) (Chapter 9), a film which, as Isabel Santaolalla points out, has been identified as a key moment in the Hollywood history of interracial romance. But, in her view, although it breaks taboo in the portrayal of a relationship between an Italian American female and an African American male, the film is ultimately a comedy of remarriage, relegating its interest in interracial relationships beneath concern with the restoration of the black couple's marriage, thus reaffirming simultaneously traditional values and the primacy of race. In her discussion of black masculinity and other related issues she further examines the extent to which racial questions refocus the priorities and conventions of romantic comedy. The book concludes with a glance at one of the most characteristic of romantic comedy stars of recent times, Meg Ryan (Chapter 11). Peter Evans argues that although expected to conform to the 'new romance's' recuperation of traditional values, the Ryan persona often lets slip the mask of conventionality, revealing even here - in this safest of images of femininity- the complex realities, desires and frustrations of modern women. The aim of this book has been to account for the rebirth of a staple Hollywood genre. Alongside brief excursions into independent cinema our choice has been determined by the desire to include a range of films which have above all mirrored and adapted their shape to changing social realities. Even though some of these films are ultimately compromised by generic history or social attitudes they are all, in our view, worthy of serious attention for the ways in which they have contributed towards the revitalisation of a genre once considered, prematurely, to be virtually extinct.

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Introduction: Surviving Love

NOTE 1 See Neale and Krutnik's discussion of the differences between romantic comedy and melodrama (1990: 133-9). WORKS CITED Babington, Bruce and Peter William Evans 1989. Affairs to Remember: The Hollywood Comedy of the Sexes. Manchester: Manchester UP Belsey, Catherine 1985. The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama. London and New York: Methuen Foucault, Michel 1981 (1976). The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin Giddens, Anthony 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity Press Henderson, Brian 1978. 'Romantic Comedy Today: Semi-Tough or Impossible?', Film Quarterly, 31, 4 (Summer): 11-23 Horton, Andrew S., ed. and intra., 1991. Comedy/Cinema/Theory. Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press Karnick, Kristine Brunovska and Henry Jenkins, eds, 1995. Classical Hollywood Comedy. New York and London: Routledge Krutnik, Frank 1990. 'The Faint Aroma of Performing Seals: The "Nervous" Romance and the Comedy of the Sexes', The Velvet Light Trap, no. 26 (Fall): 57-72 Lasch, Christopher 1991 (1979). The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton Lent, Tina Olsin 1995. 'Romantic Love and Friendship: The Redefinition of Gender Relations in Screwball Comedy'. In Karnick and Jenkins, eds, 314-31 Lewis, C. S. 1936. The Allegory of Love. Oxford: Oxford UP Musser, Charles 1995. 'Divorce, DeMille and the Comedy of Remarriage'. In Karnick and Jenkins, eds, 282-313 Neale, Steve 1992. 'The Big Romance or Something Wild?: Romantic Comedy Today', Screen, 33, 3 (Autumn): 284-99 Neale, Steve and Frank Krutnik, 1990. Popular Film and Television Comedy. London and New York: Routledge Rose, Mary Beth 1988. The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP Rowe, Kathleen 1995. The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. Austin: University of Texas Press Salingar, Leo 1974. Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP

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PETER WILLIAM EVANS AND CELESTINO DELEYTO

Seidman, Steve 1991. Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830-1980. NewYork and London: Routledge Shakespeare, William 1975 (1623). Twelfth Night. Ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik. The Arden Shakespeare. London and New York: Methuen Wexman, Virginia Wright 1993. Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance. Princeton: Princeton UP

Chapter 2 LOVE LIES: ROMANTIC FABRICATION IN CONTEIV!PORARY ROMANTIC COl\1EDY Frank Krutnik

Annie Hall: The split screen anticipates the fragrnentation of the couple as A.llen >:,Yrants more (neurotic) space to himself as Alvy than to Annie (Diane Keaton)

On stage, on screen, in literature, romantic comedy has been around for an embarrassingly long time. Endlessly recirculating, remobilising and rearticulating a stock repertoire of narrative and representational stratagems, the genre tells the same old story of heterosexual coupling. Only, it is never quite the same old story. To succeed, romantic comedies

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FRANK KRUTNIK

must do more than simply redress themselves in contemporary fashions: they must engage with the shifting priorities and possibilities of intimate culture and with the broader cultural, social and economic spheres that organise its forms and meanings. In the past three decades, Hollywood romantic comedy has had to deal with a series of especially intense reorientations within US intimate culture. The insurgent discourse of 'sexual revolution' promoted the acceptance of non-monogamous and non-heterosexual choices and lifestyles, and this inevitably weakened the previously forged bonds between love and marriage, eroticism and romance, pleasure and procreation. From the mid-1970s the liberationist sexual ethic was itself vigorously challenged by a countercritique that'highlighted the dangers and undesirable consequences of a free-wheeling, pleasure-centred desire, from depersonalisation and sexual objectification, to the destabilisation of intimate bonds and exposure to disease, exploitation and violence' (Seidman 1992: 58). Spurred on by moral panics over herpes and AIDS epidemics, opposition to the liberationist sexual ideology became a fixture of popular discourses by the mid-1980s (Seidman 1992: 82). 1 In 1984, for example, a Time magazine cover feature jubilantly proclaimed that'The Revolution is Over': From cities, suburbs and small towns alike, there is growing evidence that the national obsession with sex is subsiding. Five-speed vibrators, masturbation workshops, freshly discovered erogenous zones and even the one-night stand all seem to be losing their allure. Veterans of the revolution, some wounded, some merely bored, are reinventing courtship and romance and discovering, often with astonishment, th.at they need not sleep together on the first or second date. Many individuals are even rediscovering the traditional values of fidelity, obligation and marriage ... The buzz words these days are 'commitment', 'intimacy' and 'working at relationships'. (Leo 1984: 48) In a 1978 article in Film Quarterly, Brian Henderson suggested that alongside its challenge to the traditional agenda of heterosexual relations the liberationist ideology also threatened the viability of romantic comedy as a genre. Henderson's article laments the capitulation of the heterosexual dialectic to an ethic of individual fulfilment which prizes sex not as a vehicle for the consummation of the couple but as an

Love Lies

17

When Harry Met Sally: HafT':! (Billy Cn;stal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) begin their quest for a trouble-free paradise

instrument of self-realisation. Romantic comedy has reached an impasse, he argued, because men and women are no longer: willing to meet on a common ground and to engage all their faculties and capacities in sexual dialectic . . . What we begin to see now in films is a '>Vithdrawal of men and women from this ground (or of it from them) . Or we see - in effect the same thing false presences in the sexual dialectic or divided ones (one realises at the e1vc, 7, 16, 130 Snni-Tough, 4, 17-20 Shakespeare, William, 2, 3, 132, 135 A Midsummer Night's Dream, 4-5,138 Othello, 104, lOR Romeo and Juliet, 156 Shaw, Arnold, 25 Shore, Mitchell, 155 Silverberg, Cory, 157 Sinatra, Frank, 20, 23, 25, 25n Singleton, John, 157 Sister Carol, 89 Skin Deep, 1S6 Sklar, Robert, 185 Sleepless in Seattle, 19n, 25, 78n, 157, 170, 183, 188,190,191,195,196,204 Smith, Gavin, 78, 79, 87 Snipes, Wesley, 148, 149 Soderberg, Steven, 168 Sex, Lies and ~'ideotape, 168 Some Like It Hot, 198 Something Wild, 1, 2, 4, 7, 11, 75-92, 75, 195 Sons of the Desert, 103 Sorrow and the I'itlr, The, 23 South Central, 15 i Spacek, Sissy, 190 Spacey, Kevin, 115 Splash!, 2, 19n Stacey, Jackie', 190 Stanwyck, Barbara, 80, 189, 191, 203 Starting Over, 2, 18-20 Stella Dallas, 100 Stendhal, 5 Stephens, Gregory, 149, 159 Sterritt, David, 1Yn Stewart, James, 6ll Stoker, Bram, 104 Streep, Meryl, 18, 190 Studlar, Gaylyn, 82 Sturges, Preston The Ladv Eve, 78, 78n, 80, 83 The Palrn Beach Story, 74 Suarez, Juan A, 85 Sure Thing The, 19n Sylvia Scarlett, 80, lOll Terminator 2: judgement Day, 148, 163 Thelma and Louise, 183 Three Merz and 11 Baby, 158 Thurman, Uma, 33 Timbers, Veronica, 151 Tomei, Marisa, 193 Top Gun, 206

INDEX Troche, Rose Go Fish, 184 Trouble in Paradise, 2113 True Love, 170 Truffaut, Franc;ois, 173 Trust, 170 Truth almut Cats and Dogs, The, 31-3 Turner, Kathleen, 11, '!3, 9.1, 105, 106, I'!3 Ti1ming Point, The, 9'-J-100 Turturro, John, 161 Unlawful Entry, 84 Unmai-ricd Woman, An, 99-100 Unruly vFo111an, The, 22, 112-13 Untruired Heart, 186

van de Velde, Theodore Ideal Marriage, 107, I 07n Viano, i\1aurizio, 76, 89 Vita Nuova, 107 V 1. Warshawski, 105 Waiting to Exhale, 170 Wallace', Michele, 165, I h5n Wallerstein, lmmamJcl, 121 War of the Roses, The, 105, 193 Warren, Lesley Ann, 42 Waterston, Sam, 142 Wayne, John, 59, 61 Weaver, Sigourney, 114, 190 Weedon, C., 113 Weeks, Jeffrey, 127 Wernblad,Annette, 129-30, BOn, 131,141-2 West, Mae, 80, 202 Wexman, Virginia Wright, 5-6, 7, 191 When a lvfa1r Loves a Wo111an, 189, J 94 When Harry Met Sally, 9-10, 17, 19-20, 19n, 28-33, 139n, 170,188,193,195,200, 201,202,204,205 While Yinr Were Sleeping, 31-2, 170, 180 Who's that Girl?, 19n Wilder, Billv, 194 The Apartment, 25n The Seven Year Itch, 165 Wilder, Thornton, 104 Our TillUll, 98, 101 Wild One, The, 85 Willis, Sharon, 85 Winger, Debra, 193 Wizard ofOz, Tire, 137 Wood, Robin, 50, 51, fi4 Working Cirl, 11, 111-28, 111, 193 Worsley, Peter, 121

Yeats, W. B., 104 Young, Iris, 122 Zauberfliite, Die, 103